THERE ARE quite a few Cypriot entrepreneurs doing business in Romania, which has an under-developed economy with immense potential. When visiting Bucharest, the capital of this former socialist paradise of ugly concrete tower blocks and abject poverty, they
stay at a five-star hotel in the centre of town, where they often bump into each other.
Two Cypriot land speculators were in Bucharest to check out some real estate a couple of months ago, and were not a little surprised to see several fellow countrymen roaming around the hotel, each with a very attractive, white-skinned, long-legged, local broad by his side and the smile of a married man playing away from home on his face.
The land speculators realised that the sexy escorts were provided by someone in the hotel, as every morning, under his room door, each would find a card with a telephone number for female escorts. Their compatriots had obviously availed themselves of the escort agency’s services, because they were feeling lonely, in an unfriendly city, so many miles away from their wives.
The cards offering female escorts kept being slipped under the doors of our two protagonists, even though they had avoided calling up. On the fourth morning one land-buyer told the other, “I bet they will think that we’re gay. We must be the only Cypriots in the hotel who are not accompanied by females.”
He was right. This abnormal behaviour did not pass unnoticed in the hotel, because on the fifth day they again found a card under their door, but this time it was advertising male escorts. Quite clearly, for the Romanians, there could only be one reason for hot-blooded Cypriot men, on their own in Bucharest, not wanting female company.
A FRIEND of our establishment recently bought a seedy bar of a questionable reputation (it was frequented by Cypriot men who felt lonely and enjoyed having a chat with the eastern European waitresses) in Nicosia, with the intention of turning it into a respectable piano bar and restaurant for over-30s.
Being a law-abiding citizen, he went to the municipality to inform the competent authorities about the change of use of his establishment so that it could have a licence as a bar with live music. The previous owner’s licence was for a pizzeria, even though the
only way you could eat pizza there was if you ordered a delivery.
The friendly and helpful municipal official could not understand why the new owner wanted to change the licence of his establishment, given that a pizzeria does not have to sell pizzas. Nobody had bothered the previous owner, even though his establishment was, quite clearly, not operating as a pizzeria, the official said.
There was also a more convincing reason for not changing the licence, the official informed our friend. As a pizzeria, the business also had a permit to employ two foreign women as waitresses, but if the licence was for a ‘live music bar’, the owner would lose the work permit for two foreign women, the official explained. Our friend said he did not care, as he had no intention of employing foreign women as waitresses.
This was irrelevant, the dutiful official told him, because if in a couple of years the owner decided to sell the business, it would fetch a much higher price, if it included the work permits for two foreign women. The women permits were worth an additional £20,000 on the sale price, the extremely helpful public employee informed our friend.
Apparently, very few establishments have the right licence. One of Nicosia’ most popular nightclubs, which is packed with youths every night, has been operating with a ‘snack-bar’ licence, even though the only snack it sells is alcohol.
PERMITS might not be so valuable now that Romania and Bulgaria have joined the EU as many of the waitresses in pizzerias came from these countries anyway and employers can hire as many of them as they like.
This prospect was of great concern to the CyBC’s presenter Yiannakis Nicolaou – yes, he who wears white socks – who regaled viewers of his lunch-time show on TV with all the xenophobic clichés he had learned from his communist leaders, about the big threat to our society by the influx of under-fed foreign workers from Romania and Bulgaria.
Repeating official AKEL rhetoric, Nicolaou predicted there would be problems with “the coherence” of the “Cypriot social core”, whatever that is supposed to mean. I suspect the AKEL comrades use these fancy terms, which nobody understands, in order to disguise their racist prejudices. Instead of Nicolaou openly saying that Bulgarians and Romanians will come and take Greek Cypriot jobs, use our hospitals for free and break up marriages, he talked of the threat to the coherence of “the social core” and other such nonsense.
What really galls is the ingratitude! During the Cold War era, thousands of Akelite youngsters, including the intellectually challenged TV presenter, studied in Bulgarian universities, completely free of charge – they were given free education, free accommodation and free healthcare. OK, they may have had to offer the odd goat as a gift to a professor to get their degree, but otherwise they paid nothing.
But now that a few thousand impoverished Bulgarians might head to our shores, looking for a half-decent living, the horridly selfish comrades are worried about the “Cypriot social core”.
SO FAREWELL Michalakis Zampelas, former mayor of Nicosia – under you, the coherence of the social core of our capital was safeguarded despite the mass influx of foreign workers. You also managed to bring people back to neglected Ledra Street, turning it into a bustling, multi-ethnic city centre, full of colour and life.
But if there was one thing you did that alone deserved a second term it was the unique Christmas tree, decorated with beer cans, that you put in Eleftheria Square.
In the end, Zampelas was the victim of a bad decision by the referee’s assistant, in the APOEL-Omonia match, played on the eve of the elections. In the last minute of the match, Omonia scored what looked like the winning goal, but it was wrongly disallowed for offside by ref’s assistant Hapeshis, driving Omonia’s fans berserk. They were convinced that Hapeshis had calculatingly robbed their side of the three points.
The decision created a siege mentality among the hysterical Omonia supporters, 99.9 per cent of whom are also AKEL-voting commies, and helped unite them for the elections.
What helped was the hilarious SMS message sent out to all Omonia supporters after the game. We found the message (nobody sent it to us as we are not great supporters of the AKEL-Omonia axis) on the excellent Stravara Mas blog (http://stravara.blogspot.com). It said:
“Behind-the-scenes fascism has struck again. They are deciding for us, like the true descendants of EOKA B, behind closed doors, who will win this year’s championship – the much-detested APOEL crowd. Let’s begin our resistance as of tomorrow by voting for all the AKEL candidates. We respond with unity! (Send the SMS everywhere).”
The message worked wonders as it rallied the commie voters and deprived poor old Michalakis of all the Akelite votes that opinion polls showed he had in the bag – until the fascist Hapeshis raised his flag for the non-existent offside that is.
THE OFFSIDE decision did not help AKEL’s pony-tailed candidate for Famagusta mayor, Yiannakis Skordis. Despite Skordis’ and his party’s unrelenting public attacks on his opponent, Alexis Galanos still won comfortably, ending a 60-year commie stranglehold on the Famagusta mayorship. This was the sweetest (or should we say sugar-coated) result of the election, as Galanos, without the official backing of any party, marked his return to politics after a long absence, by crushing the candidate of the three-party alliance. We hope he will give our establishment a
couple of multi-million contracts for the rebuilding of Famagusta, which is set to begin soon, as recognition of our support.
STRAVARA MAS, which coined the phrase ‘Shistris waiter’ for the man serving as our High Commissioner in London, George Iacovou and refers to our plantation as ‘Stravaraland’, reported a story that was not picked by anyone. Some customers may remember the case of the Russian woman detained at checkpoint last November, for allegedly paying a deposit on a property in the north that was being built on Greek Cypriot land.
The media made a very big fuss about the event, informing us that the young woman’s passport had been seized and that she faced up to seven years in prison if found guilty. Huge publicity was given by the media to the first day of the trial, but then the issue, like most things, was forgotten.
According to Stravara Mas, the Attorney-general decided to stop proceedings against the woman. It speculates that the decision was taken for humanitarian reasons – the woman had an 18-month-old child waiting in Moscow. Another explanation could be that the Russian government had asked for charges to be dropped against its national and our government obliged, given the unwavering support given to our cause by that principled supporter of respect for human rights, President Putin.
I bet it was neither, because when it comes to our beloved country I subscribe to the cock-up theory of history. I suspect that there were no legal grounds to bring charges against the woman but the AG realised this only after she had been charged. And because in this country we have rule of law, the case had to be abandoned despite our embarrassment.
IS OUR MINISTER of Education capable of taking any decision on his own? I am beginning to believe that even to decide what to have for lunch he would set up a committee first, if it were practically feasible, to advise him.
We are still awaiting a decision about the use of mobile phones in schools, the committees set up by Pefkios more than three weeks ago are still involved in discussions about this most complicated issue. Why had Pefkios raised the issue of banning mobile phones at school, when he knew that he did not have the guts to impose such a measure?
Committees consisting of ministry officials, teachers, parents and, of course, students, began deliberations in mid-December but have still to arrive at a decision. Teenage student reps repeatedly stated they were opposed to the ban, leaving Pefkios in a quandary over what to do.
Would he respect the wishes of the kids, in the name of democracy, and thus add substance to the view that teenagers were running the education system, because the minister was too weak and indecisive? I bet he will set up a committee to advise him which is the better course to follow.
OUR ETHNARCH and all the incompetents who surround him – with the exception of our foreign minister Giorgos Lillikas, who is away on a two-week skiing holiday in Austria – were taken aback by Mehmet Ali Talat’s announcement that he would demolish the bridge at the end of Ledra Street so that another crossing point could be opened.
The demolition of the bridge had been set as a condition – together with 20 other conditions that make the opening of the crossing point impossible – by our Ethnarch at the end of 2005. The government’s response to the latest move was, as expected, resoundingly negative, dismissing Talat’s announcement as a “communications trick” and haughtily stating that all Tassos’ conditions had to be satisfied before the crossing was opened.
Aware that Talat had emphatically exposed his unwillingness to open the Ledra St crossing, the Ethnarch went on the offensive with his own “communications trick”. He got one of his flunkeys, probably secret service chief, Tasos Tzionis, to tell a CyBC hack that while the bridge was being demolished, the Turks would be opening a tunnel in area.
This became big news on the state propaganda corporation, with the naïve hack claiming that his information was extremely reliable. Had he been a bit smarter he would have realized that he had been stitched up by someone at the palazzo. Contacted by another hack, Tzionis said the government had information about the tunnel but could not confirm it. And what was this information based on? Did one of Tzionis’ agents see a shovel by the bridge? UNFICYP denied there was a tunnel.
OUR MISERABLY didactic government sophist, Pashiardis, could not resist taking the moral high ground on Friday. “The opening of a tunnel in the specific area cannot be confirmed,” he pompously announced adding the obligatory element of sophistry: “If the bridge is not demolished, you understand there is no need for a tunnel.”
As regards the tunnel, no statement had been made by the government he stressed. A CyBC hack had been used to do the government’s lying (he did not say that). If the government was not the reliable source of the tunnel story, who was, the UN, the occupation troops or a coffee-cup reader?
Is the government not fed up of propagating nothing but misinformation? Why can it not be honest, for once, and say openly that it does not want the crossing in Ledra Street instead of inventing tunnels, symbols and frontier stations? These idiotically transparent publicity tricks fool nobody apart from the odd obedient CyBC hack, who believes it is a patriotic duty to lie for your government.
WE HAVE still not received any news about the publication date of Michalis Ignatiou’s eagerly-awaited book about all the Cypriots who had been bribed to support the A-plan during the referendum. If our friend Michalis is having trouble finding a publisher, because of the controversial contents of his book, he should contact us and we can put him in touch with a new company that undertakes to publish as little as one book, at 11 bucks per copy. If he cannot afford the 11 bucks he should call us and we go out on street to collect the money.
